More on Media Bias
Mainstream media is biased toward the liberal democrats.
I am happy that a few reporters are willing to stand up for the truth.
A reader sent me the following link that correlates very well with today’s topic of media bias. This particular author is a hard-core democrat on most issues, but he honestly assesses this situation as reporters should.
The original link is here, but the article is reposted for convenience.
http://www.ldsmag.com/ideas/081017light.html
Would the Last Honest Reporter Please Turn On the Lights?
By Orson Scott Card
Editor's note: Orson Scott Card is a Democrat and a newspaper columnist, and in this opinion piece he takes on both while lamenting the current state of journalism.
An open letter to the local daily paper — almost every local daily paper in America:
I remember reading All the President's Men and thinking: That's journalism. You do what it takes to get the truth and you lay it before the public, because the public has a right to know.
This housing crisis didn't come out of nowhere. It was not a vague emanation of the evil Bush administration.
It was a direct result of the political decision, back in the late 1990s, to loosen the rules of lending so that home loans would be more accessible to poor people. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were authorized to approve risky loans.
What is a risky loan? It's a loan that the recipient is likely not to be able to repay.
The goal of this rule change was to help the poor — which especially would help members of minority groups. But how does it help these people to give them a loan that they can't repay?
They get into a house, yes, but when they can't make the payments, they lose the house — along with their credit rating.
They end up worse off than before.
This was completely foreseeable and in fact many people did foresee it. One political party, in Congress and in the executive branch, tried repeatedly to tighten up the rules. The other party blocked every such attempt and tried to loosen them.
Furthermore, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were making political contributions to the very members of Congress who were allowing them to make irresponsible loans. (Though why quasi-federal agencies were allowed to do so baffles me. It's as if the Pentagon were allowed to contribute to the political campaigns of Congressmen who support increasing their budget.)
Isn't there a story here? Doesn't journalism require that you who produce our daily paper tell the truth about who brought us to a position where the only way to keep confidence in our economy was a $700 billion bailout? Aren't you supposed to follow the money and see which politicians were benefiting personally from the deregulation of mortgage lending?
I have no doubt that if these facts had pointed to the Republican Party or to John McCain as the guilty parties, you would be treating it as a vast scandal. "Housing-gate," no doubt. Or "Fannie-gate."
Instead, it was Senator Christopher Dodd and Congressman Barney Frank, both Democrats, who denied that there were any problems, who refused Bush administration requests to set up a regulatory agency to watch over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and who were still pushing for these agencies to go even further in promoting sub-prime mortgage loans almost up to the minute they failed.
As Thomas Sowell points out in a TownHall.com essay entitled "Do Facts Matter?" ( http://snipurl.com/457townhall_com] ): "Alan Greenspan warned them four years ago. So did the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers to the President. So did Bush's Secretary of the Treasury."
These are facts. This financial crisis was completely preventable. The party that blocked any attempt to prevent it was ... the Democratic Party. The party that tried to prevent it was ... the Republican Party.
Yet when Nancy Pelosi accused the Bush administration and Republican deregulation of causing the crisis, you in the press did not hold her to account for her lie. Instead, you criticized Republicans who took offense at this lie and refused to vote for the bailout!
What? It's not the liar, but the victims of the lie who are to blame?
Now let's follow the money ... right to the presidential candidate who is the number-two recipient of campaign contributions from Fannie Mae.
And after Freddie Raines, the CEO of Fannie Mae who made $90 million while running it into the ground, was fired for his incompetence, one presidential candidate's campaign actually consulted him for advice on housing.
If that presidential candidate had been John McCain, you would have called it a major scandal and we would be getting stories in your paper every day about how incompetent and corrupt he was.
But instead, that candidate was Barack Obama, and so you have buried this story, and when the McCain campaign dared to call Raines an "adviser" to the Obama campaign — because that campaign had sought his advice — you actually let Obama's people get away with accusing McCain of lying, merely because Raines wasn't listed as an official adviser to the Obama campaign.
You would never tolerate such weasely nit-picking from a Republican.
If you who produce our local daily paper actually had any principles, you would be pounding this story, because the prosperity of all Americans was put at risk by the foolish, short-sighted, politically selfish, and possibly corrupt actions of leading Democrats, including Obama.
If you who produce our local daily paper had any personal honor, you would find it unbearable to let the American people believe that somehow Republicans were to blame for this crisis.
There are precedents. Even though President Bush and his administration never said that Iraq sponsored or was linked to 9/11, you could not stand the fact that Americans had that misapprehension — so you pounded us with the fact that there was no such link. (Along the way, you created the false impression that Bush had lied to them and said that there was a connection.)
If you had any principles, then surely right now, when the American people are set to blame President Bush and John McCain for a crisis they tried to prevent, and are actually shifting to approve of Barack Obama because of a crisis he helped cause, you would be laboring at least as hard to correct that false impression.
Your job, as journalists, is to tell the truth. That's what you claim you do, when you accept people's money to buy or subscribe to your paper.
But right now, you are consenting to or actively promoting a big fat lie — that the housing crisis should somehow be blamed on Bush, McCain, and the Republicans. You have trained the American people to blame everything bad — even bad weather — on Bush, and they are responding as you have taught them to.
If you had any personal honor, each reporter and editor would be insisting on telling the truth — even if it hurts the election chances of your favorite candidate.
Because that's what honorable people do. Honest people tell the truth even when they don't like the probable consequences. That's what honesty means . That's how trust is earned.
Barack Obama is just another politician, and not a very wise one. He has revealed his ignorance and naivete time after time — and you have swept it under the rug, treated it as nothing.
Meanwhile, you have participated in the borking of Sarah Palin, reporting savage attacks on her for the pregnancy of her unmarried daughter — while you ignored the story of John Edwards's own adultery for many months.
So I ask you now: Do you have any standards at all? Do you even know what honesty means?
Is getting people to vote for Barack Obama so important that you will throw away everything that journalism is supposed to stand for?
You might want to remember the way the National Organization of Women threw away their integrity by supporting Bill Clinton despite his well-known pattern of sexual exploitation of powerless women. Who listens to NOW anymore? We know they stand for nothing; they have no principles.
That's where you are right now.
It's not too late. You know that if the situation were reversed, and the truth would damage McCain and help Obama, you would be moving heaven and earth to get the true story out there.
If you want to redeem your honor, you will swallow hard and make a list of all the stories you would print if it were McCain who had been getting money from Fannie Mae, McCain whose campaign had consulted with its discredited former CEO, McCain who had voted against tightening its lending practices.
Then you will print them, even though every one of those true stories will point the finger of blame at the reckless Democratic Party, which put our nation's prosperity at risk so they could feel good about helping the poor, and lay a fair share of the blame at Obama's door.
You will also tell the truth about John McCain: that he tried, as a Senator, to do what it took to prevent this crisis. You will tell the truth about President Bush: that his administration tried more than once to get Congress to regulate lending in a responsible way.
This was a Congress-caused crisis, beginning during the Clinton administration, with Democrats leading the way into the crisis and blocking every effort to get out of it in a timely fashion.
If you at our local daily newspaper continue to let Americans believe — and vote as if — President Bush and the Republicans caused the crisis, then you are joining in that lie.
If you do not tell the truth about the Democrats — including Barack Obama — and do so with the same energy you would use if the miscreants were Republicans — then you are not journalists by any standard.
You're just the public relations machine of the Democratic Party, and it's time you were all fired and real journalists brought in, so that we can actually have a news paper in our city.
This article first appeared in The Rhinoceros Times of Greensboro, North Carolina, and is used here by permission.
I am happy that a few reporters are willing to stand up for the truth.
A reader sent me the following link that correlates very well with today’s topic of media bias. This particular author is a hard-core democrat on most issues, but he honestly assesses this situation as reporters should.
The original link is here, but the article is reposted for convenience.
http://www.ldsmag.com/ideas/081017light.html
Would the Last Honest Reporter Please Turn On the Lights?
By Orson Scott Card
Editor's note: Orson Scott Card is a Democrat and a newspaper columnist, and in this opinion piece he takes on both while lamenting the current state of journalism.
An open letter to the local daily paper — almost every local daily paper in America:
I remember reading All the President's Men and thinking: That's journalism. You do what it takes to get the truth and you lay it before the public, because the public has a right to know.
This housing crisis didn't come out of nowhere. It was not a vague emanation of the evil Bush administration.
It was a direct result of the political decision, back in the late 1990s, to loosen the rules of lending so that home loans would be more accessible to poor people. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were authorized to approve risky loans.
What is a risky loan? It's a loan that the recipient is likely not to be able to repay.
The goal of this rule change was to help the poor — which especially would help members of minority groups. But how does it help these people to give them a loan that they can't repay?
They get into a house, yes, but when they can't make the payments, they lose the house — along with their credit rating.
They end up worse off than before.
This was completely foreseeable and in fact many people did foresee it. One political party, in Congress and in the executive branch, tried repeatedly to tighten up the rules. The other party blocked every such attempt and tried to loosen them.
Furthermore, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were making political contributions to the very members of Congress who were allowing them to make irresponsible loans. (Though why quasi-federal agencies were allowed to do so baffles me. It's as if the Pentagon were allowed to contribute to the political campaigns of Congressmen who support increasing their budget.)
Isn't there a story here? Doesn't journalism require that you who produce our daily paper tell the truth about who brought us to a position where the only way to keep confidence in our economy was a $700 billion bailout? Aren't you supposed to follow the money and see which politicians were benefiting personally from the deregulation of mortgage lending?
I have no doubt that if these facts had pointed to the Republican Party or to John McCain as the guilty parties, you would be treating it as a vast scandal. "Housing-gate," no doubt. Or "Fannie-gate."
Instead, it was Senator Christopher Dodd and Congressman Barney Frank, both Democrats, who denied that there were any problems, who refused Bush administration requests to set up a regulatory agency to watch over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and who were still pushing for these agencies to go even further in promoting sub-prime mortgage loans almost up to the minute they failed.
As Thomas Sowell points out in a TownHall.com essay entitled "Do Facts Matter?" ( http://snipurl.com/457townhall_com] ): "Alan Greenspan warned them four years ago. So did the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers to the President. So did Bush's Secretary of the Treasury."
These are facts. This financial crisis was completely preventable. The party that blocked any attempt to prevent it was ... the Democratic Party. The party that tried to prevent it was ... the Republican Party.
Yet when Nancy Pelosi accused the Bush administration and Republican deregulation of causing the crisis, you in the press did not hold her to account for her lie. Instead, you criticized Republicans who took offense at this lie and refused to vote for the bailout!
What? It's not the liar, but the victims of the lie who are to blame?
Now let's follow the money ... right to the presidential candidate who is the number-two recipient of campaign contributions from Fannie Mae.
And after Freddie Raines, the CEO of Fannie Mae who made $90 million while running it into the ground, was fired for his incompetence, one presidential candidate's campaign actually consulted him for advice on housing.
If that presidential candidate had been John McCain, you would have called it a major scandal and we would be getting stories in your paper every day about how incompetent and corrupt he was.
But instead, that candidate was Barack Obama, and so you have buried this story, and when the McCain campaign dared to call Raines an "adviser" to the Obama campaign — because that campaign had sought his advice — you actually let Obama's people get away with accusing McCain of lying, merely because Raines wasn't listed as an official adviser to the Obama campaign.
You would never tolerate such weasely nit-picking from a Republican.
If you who produce our local daily paper actually had any principles, you would be pounding this story, because the prosperity of all Americans was put at risk by the foolish, short-sighted, politically selfish, and possibly corrupt actions of leading Democrats, including Obama.
If you who produce our local daily paper had any personal honor, you would find it unbearable to let the American people believe that somehow Republicans were to blame for this crisis.
There are precedents. Even though President Bush and his administration never said that Iraq sponsored or was linked to 9/11, you could not stand the fact that Americans had that misapprehension — so you pounded us with the fact that there was no such link. (Along the way, you created the false impression that Bush had lied to them and said that there was a connection.)
If you had any principles, then surely right now, when the American people are set to blame President Bush and John McCain for a crisis they tried to prevent, and are actually shifting to approve of Barack Obama because of a crisis he helped cause, you would be laboring at least as hard to correct that false impression.
Your job, as journalists, is to tell the truth. That's what you claim you do, when you accept people's money to buy or subscribe to your paper.
But right now, you are consenting to or actively promoting a big fat lie — that the housing crisis should somehow be blamed on Bush, McCain, and the Republicans. You have trained the American people to blame everything bad — even bad weather — on Bush, and they are responding as you have taught them to.
If you had any personal honor, each reporter and editor would be insisting on telling the truth — even if it hurts the election chances of your favorite candidate.
Because that's what honorable people do. Honest people tell the truth even when they don't like the probable consequences. That's what honesty means . That's how trust is earned.
Barack Obama is just another politician, and not a very wise one. He has revealed his ignorance and naivete time after time — and you have swept it under the rug, treated it as nothing.
Meanwhile, you have participated in the borking of Sarah Palin, reporting savage attacks on her for the pregnancy of her unmarried daughter — while you ignored the story of John Edwards's own adultery for many months.
So I ask you now: Do you have any standards at all? Do you even know what honesty means?
Is getting people to vote for Barack Obama so important that you will throw away everything that journalism is supposed to stand for?
You might want to remember the way the National Organization of Women threw away their integrity by supporting Bill Clinton despite his well-known pattern of sexual exploitation of powerless women. Who listens to NOW anymore? We know they stand for nothing; they have no principles.
That's where you are right now.
It's not too late. You know that if the situation were reversed, and the truth would damage McCain and help Obama, you would be moving heaven and earth to get the true story out there.
If you want to redeem your honor, you will swallow hard and make a list of all the stories you would print if it were McCain who had been getting money from Fannie Mae, McCain whose campaign had consulted with its discredited former CEO, McCain who had voted against tightening its lending practices.
Then you will print them, even though every one of those true stories will point the finger of blame at the reckless Democratic Party, which put our nation's prosperity at risk so they could feel good about helping the poor, and lay a fair share of the blame at Obama's door.
You will also tell the truth about John McCain: that he tried, as a Senator, to do what it took to prevent this crisis. You will tell the truth about President Bush: that his administration tried more than once to get Congress to regulate lending in a responsible way.
This was a Congress-caused crisis, beginning during the Clinton administration, with Democrats leading the way into the crisis and blocking every effort to get out of it in a timely fashion.
If you at our local daily newspaper continue to let Americans believe — and vote as if — President Bush and the Republicans caused the crisis, then you are joining in that lie.
If you do not tell the truth about the Democrats — including Barack Obama — and do so with the same energy you would use if the miscreants were Republicans — then you are not journalists by any standard.
You're just the public relations machine of the Democratic Party, and it's time you were all fired and real journalists brought in, so that we can actually have a news paper in our city.
This article first appeared in The Rhinoceros Times of Greensboro, North Carolina, and is used here by permission.
posted by Anonymous at 2:50 PM
10 Comments:
I am glad that you think this reporter, Mr. Card, is willing to stand up for the truth. Truth is good thing.
By the way, Mr. Card is for gun control and is a Democrat, at least partly, because he believes the Republicans still tolerate racism.
How much truth can you stand?
You can check him out on Wikipedia.
His personal beliefs on these other issues are just that. His personal views. I disagree with him.
But since he is a very staunch democrat, it was refreshing that even he can acknowledge the facts about the media bias.
Why can't you?
I know exactly what you mean about iit being refreshing for someone to play against type, which is why I've enjoyed reading the wisdom of conservatives like Chris Buckley and Colin Powell endorse Barack Obama.
Card wrote: "That's journalism. You do what it takes to get the truth and you lay it before the public, because the public has a right to know."
That's also refreshing, and highly reminiscent of the failures of mainstream journalism to ask the right questions of GW Bush prior to the invasion of Iraq.
I suppose Colin Powell is doing penance for his role in accepting outright lies as justification. Is penance a Biblical concept?
From Eric Alterman, circa 2003:
But while some conservatives actually believe their own grumbles, the smart ones don't. They know mau-mauing the other side is just a good way to get their own ideas across--or perhaps prevent the other side from getting a fair hearing for theirs. On occasion, honest conservatives admit this. Rich Bond, then chair of the Republican Party, complained during the 1992 election, "I think we know who the media want to win this election--and I don't think it's George Bush." The very same Rich Bond, however, also noted during the very same election, "There is some strategy to it [bashing the 'liberal' media].... If you watch any great coach, what they try to do is 'work the refs.' Maybe the ref will cut you a little slack on the next one."
Bond is hardly alone. That the media were biased against the Reagan Administration is an article of faith among Republicans. Yet James Baker, perhaps the most media-savvy of them, owned up to the fact that any such complaint was decidedly misplaced. "There were days and times and events we might have had some complaints [but] on balance I don't think we had anything to complain about," he explained to one writer. Patrick Buchanan, among the most conservative pundits and presidential candidates in Republican history, found that he could not identify any allegedly liberal bias against him during his presidential candidacies. "I've gotten balanced coverage, and broad coverage--all we could have asked. For heaven sakes, we kid about the 'liberal media,' but every Republican on earth does that," the aspiring American ayatollah cheerfully confessed during the 1996 campaign. And even William Kristol, without a doubt the most influential Republican/neoconservative publicist in America today, has come clean on this issue. "I admit it," he told a reporter. "The liberal media were never that powerful, and the whole thing was often used as an excuse by conservatives for conservative failures." Nevertheless, Kristol apparently feels no compunction about exploiting and reinforcing the ignorant prejudices of his own constituency. In a 2001 pitch to conservative potential subscribers to his Rupert Murdoch-funded magazine, Kristol complained, "The trouble with politics and political coverage today is that there's too much liberal bias.... There's too much tilt toward the left-wing agenda. Too much apology for liberal policy failures. Too much pandering to liberal candidates and causes." (It's a wonder he left out "Too much hypocrisy.")
Roger,
I watched Chris Buckley on the Daily Show and he denied being a conservative. He made it very clear that he was the son of a famous conservative. As for Colin Powell, I'm not sure he's even as conservative as John McCain.
Ultimately, they're nice examples theoretically but not much use in persuading anyone of...anything. The issues most important to me are Economy, National Security especially with respect to Energy independece, Taxes, and Supreme Court nominations in no particular order. I was borderline furious when Obama said in the debate he would nominate judges that would make fair and just decisions (instead of constitutional ones). It seems a shame that a legislator and former attorney would think the Supreme Court's role is to make laws.
Oops,
My comment sounds critical only of your use of the deserter argument. I meant that all of the deserter examples are good in theory only but have little power of persuasion.
Here's a bit more balance.
Radio’s Right Wing Could Be In Trouble
October 22nd, 2008 by Billy Reed ·
The closer we come to a Barack Obama victory on Nov. 4, the more the nation’s ultra-right-wingers are fretting that their monopoly on the radio industry might be in jeopardy. On ABC Sunday morning, Newt Gingrich darkly warned that the Rush Limbaughs and Sean Hannitys of the radio world might be in trouble if Obama is elected.
In other words, he’s afraid that Obama’s supporters might try to do what the Bush-Cheney brainwashing crowd almost got away with over the last eight years – control the airwaves to the point that freedom of thought and difference of opinion is suppressed to the point of extinction.
Just the other day, as I was flipping around the AM dial on my car radio, I noticed that of the six stations I checked, one had a sports show, one had music, and four had a right-wing host bashing Obama about something or the other.
The Limbaughs of the world can talk all they want about the “liberal mainstream media,” but the fact is, it’s a myth. If you don’t believe that, find me a “liberal” radio talk show. Go ahead. In the South and Midwest, they’re virtually non-existent.
It’s another example of greedy right-wingers taking advantage of deregulation.
It used to be that the Federal Communications Commission had strict rules about station ownership in order to assure freedom of expression and serve the best interests of the public. The theory was that too much power concentrated in too few hands could lead to what we’ve had in recent years – a serious tilt in balance toward one side or the other.
But when the FCC was deregulated, big communications corporations owned by ultra-right-wing business moguls began buying up stations everywhere so they could control what goes on the air.
The most egregious offender is Clear Channel, which is to radio what the Fox News Network is to network TV. Except worse. It’s impossible to find a “liberal” talk show on a Clear Channel station because the corporate owners order their affiliations to replace local pundits with their nationally syndicated hosts such as Limbaugh and the others of his narrow-minded, mean-spirited ilk.
This accomplishes two goals: It enhances the corporate bottom line and it gets the message spread 24/7. You know the message, right? It goes like this: Liberals are unpatriotic, anti-God demons who are responsible for the decline in “family values,” whatever they are, and Conservatives are heroes trying to preserve an American way of life that pays scant attention to diversity, inclusion, and tolerance.
That’s an oversimplification, of course, but it’s close.
As the years have worn out, the ultra-right has even distorted the meaning of “conservative.” Whatever the Bush-Cheney philosophy is, it’s not traditional conservatism. That’s why both Obama and Republican John McCain are running against George W. and his failed policies.
In Louisville, we’ve never needed the nightly Joe Elliott Show on WHAS, the commonwealth’s only 50,000-watt station, more than we need it now. But Clear Channel gave Joe’s nightly show the boot a few months ago and replaced it with the syndicated garbage of national host Michael Savage.
Replacing a local show with any syndicated show is never good for the local audience. It diminishes the opportunity to discuss issues important to the listening audience and to hold public officials accountable. Elliott always was a voice of reason who carefully examined both sides of an issue. He did not play favorites. He was the epitome of responsible radio journalism.
To replace Elliott with Savage was disgraceful. Savage is a vulgarian who cares only about drawing attention to himself. He has no redeeming qualities, social or otherwise. He’s an insult not so much to the intelligence of the audience, but to its decency. Putting him on the air in Elliott’s place demeans the proud tradition of WHAS. It also tilts the balance of the station’s programming so far to the right that an FCC investigation might be in order.
Like the best newspapers, the best radio and TV stations are public trusts. They were never intended to be mere commercial enterprises. They have an obligation to keep the public informed in a fair and honest way. Instead, they’ve become propaganda centers for the ultra-right-wing agenda.
If Obama is elected, I hope he pushes for more regulation of the airwaves. I’m certainly not talking about censorship. I’m talking about the freedom of opinion guaranteed by the First Amendment.
So if a station wants to use Limbaugh, that’s fine so long as it devotes equal time to a host with a different point of view. The only way the public can make intelligent decisions is to get information and opinion from all areas of the political spectrum.
History tells us that anytime a dictator seizes control, the first thing he does is take over the media. (Then come the artists and intellectuals, more commonly known in Rush world as the “Hollywood elite”).
Over the last eight years in this country, we have come frighteningly close to losing our airwaves to a group of tyrants and bullies who want to control our minds by controlling the flow of information.
But now help may be on the way. The monopoly may be over. And that’s why you heard Gingrich and others squealing about what might happen to Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity.
Roger,
Surely you do not believe the "fairness doctrine" is constitutional.
Left wing radio talk shows don't exist because they make no economic sense for the stations.
This has been the case in multiple markets. They just don't have the listeners that continually support them and is probably related to having so many other mainstream media methods to get their message out.
Freedom of speech works both ways. Attempting to squelch the right's only major communication method in unconstitutional.
If you believe censoring the radio is valid, you are more radical than I originally thought
The fairness doctrine was constitutional because it regulated public property (the radio spectrum that broadcasters are given permission to use).
I wish Chris Hedges had his own show.
Post a Comment
<< Home